In short
- The crossed-out price is not your usual price. It is the lowest price you charged during the thirty days before the reduction.
- A past promotion sets the reference for the next one. The crossed-out price of an operation is the lowest price of the thirty days preceding it, your own promotional prices included. A discount placed inside that window therefore lowers the reference of the operation that follows. This is the point that catches out the most shops.
- Direct consequence for Black Friday: a promotion falling within the thirty days before Black Friday sets its reference. For Black Friday on 27 November 2026, everything from 28 October onwards counts, and warming up inside that window crushes the discount you will be allowed to display when traffic peaks.
- Enforcement has changed in nature. Since the French law of 30 June 2025, the consumer protection authority can demand access to an online retailer’s pricing algorithms. What gets inspected is no longer the product page, it is the mechanism that sets the price.
The rule is well known in principle and wrongly applied in practice. Almost every online retailer knows the lowest price of the last thirty days has to be shown. Almost none has absorbed what happens when two promotions follow one another, and that is precisely the situation of any shop between October and December.
The subject is worth revisiting now rather than in November: the decisions that determine your Black Friday crossed-out price are taken in the coming weeks.
The rule as it stands
It comes from European directive 2019/2161, known as Omnibus, which inserts an article 6a into directive 98/6/EC on price indication. In France it was transposed by order no. 2021-1734 of 22 December 2021 into article L. 112-1-1 of the Consumer Code, and has applied since 28 May 2022.
Any announcement of a reduction must state the lowest price charged by the trader during the thirty days preceding the reduction. The form remains free: percentage, amount in euros, crossed-out price, it does not matter. What is regulated is the reference, not the layout.
Two points that often get forgotten. The lowest price means yours, not a recommended retail price and not a competitor’s. And in France the word soldes is legally reserved for the two official sale periods: outside those windows you announce a promotion, an offer, a discount, never soldes.
One exclusion exists, and it is rarely mentioned: the rule does not apply to price reduction announcements on perishable goods liable to rapid deterioration.
The trap: your previous promotion sets the next one
Here is the part most articles cover in one line, and that decides your season.
The reference price is a rolling minimum: you must display the lowest price of the last thirty days, and that minimum includes your own promotional prices. An operation placed inside that window does more than lower a price: it lowers the reference of the campaign that follows. After thirty days the effect disappears and the reference goes back up to your standing price.
One exception exists, and it works the opposite way to what people assume: where a single operation increases its discount in steps, without interruption, the reference stays the price from before the first step, under the third paragraph of article L. 112-1-1. The European Commission’s guidance reads it strictly: two distinct campaigns, a back-to-school offer then Black Friday, do not qualify and fall back under the general thirty-day rule.
| What the shop does | What it thinks it can show | What it must show |
|---|---|---|
| Priced at 100 € all year, promotion at 80 € in November | Crossed out 100 €, so -20% | Crossed out 100 €, so -20%. Compliant |
| Priced at 100 €, back-to-school offer at 85 € in October, then Black Friday at 70 € | Crossed out 100 €, so -30% | Crossed out 85 €, so -18%, if the October offer falls within the preceding thirty days: the reference is the lowest price of that window, your promotional prices included. If it is more than thirty days earlier, the reference goes back to 100 € |
| Priced at 100 €, standing discount at 90 € for six months, promotion at 75 € | Crossed out 100 €, so -25% | Crossed out 90 €, so -17%. The 100 € was not charged within the last thirty days |
| Product launched three weeks ago at 60 €, promotion at 50 € | Crossed out 60 € | Crossed out 60 €, the lowest price charged since it went on sale. France did not take up the derogation the directive opened for new arrivals: no particular statement is required |
The mistake that costs the most Running a warm-up operation within the thirty days before Black Friday. It sets November’s reference at a lower level, and the discount you can display when traffic peaks ends up crushed. The promotional calendar is no longer only a margin question, it is a legal constraint that has to be planned ahead.
What enforcement now looks at
The 2025 change went largely unnoticed and it is structural. The French law no. 2025-594 of 30 June 2025 strengthened the consumer protection authority’s investigative powers. Since 2 July 2025, article L. 512-11 of the Consumer Code provides that authorised agents “have access to software, stored data and algorithms“. The word was absent from the previous version, and pricing algorithms are covered.
That shifts the subject. Previously an inspection recorded a display at a given moment. Today it can reach the mechanism producing the price, which directly concerns any shop running a dynamic pricing tool or a marketplace repricer. Those tools adjust prices continuously, often without keeping a readable history, and it is exactly that history which is being asked for.
Published enforcement confirms it. In its press release of 3 July 2025, the French authority fined the company operating a large online fashion retailer 40 million euros: on records taken between 1 October 2022 and 31 August 2023, 57% of the announcements checked offered no reduction at all and 11% were in fact price increases. That is not a rounding error, it is a mechanism producing fictitious discounts at scale.
The same rule across the Union
One point gets lost in French coverage, this article included so far: the obligation is not French. It comes from the Omnibus directive, and all twenty-seven member states have transposed it. The rolling thirty-day minimum and the progressive markdown exception are written into the European text, not into its French version, so they apply the same way everywhere. Germany, for instance, transposed them into paragraph 11 of its Preisangabenverordnung, in wording that follows the French article almost to the letter: lowest-price paragraph first, stepped-discount paragraph second.
Since then the Court of Justice has settled a point many shops get wrong. In its judgment of 26 September 2024 (case C-330/23, Aldi Süd), it ruled that a reduction announced as a percentage, or through any statement highlighting how advantageous the price is, must be calculated on the reference price rather than on the current one. In practice: if your thirty-day floor is 85 €, you cannot announce “-30%” worked out from 100 €, even if you correctly cross out 85 €. The percentage starts from the reference too. The case came from Germany, and the ruling binds all twenty-seven.
What does change from one country to the next comes down to two things. First, the options the directive leaves to member states: the treatment of perishable goods, and of products on sale for less than thirty days. France excluded the former and did not take up the derogation for the latter, so the answer given above about a product launched three weeks ago does not transpose as it stands to your neighbours. Second, and more concretely, how the rule gets enforced. In France, an administrative inspection and a fine. In Germany, litigation runs mostly through unfair competition law, brought by competitors and consumer associations: that is the route the case decided by the Court took. Same text, a different kind of risk, and a far more frequent one.
The United Kingdom deserves its own mention: it is the closest neighbour, and it does not apply the thirty-day rule. Across the Channel there is no fixed window; the crossed-out price must be a “genuine and realistic selling price”, and it is for the trader to be able to demonstrate it. The British competition authority illustrates failure with two examples: a product launched at £120 in April then sold at £90 from May to July, where the crossed-out price is no longer the usual price; and a product sold at £150 in five units then at £100 in two hundred, where the reference was never a real selling price. Enforcement now sits under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, for which the authority published its guidance on 4 April 2025. The practical consequence if you sell on both sides of the Channel: the same product falls under two different tests, a thirty-day measurement in the Union, a demonstration of good faith in the United Kingdom.
In the United States and Australia the reasoning matches the British one: a good-faith requirement, with no fixed window. The Federal Trade Commission’s federal rule requires the crossed-out price to be a bona fide price, genuinely offered to the public “on a regular basis for a reasonably substantial period of time”: a test of good faith, not a measurement. California went further as early as 1941, requiring the former price to have been the prevailing price within the three months before the advertisement, failing which the date it actually prevailed must be displayed. In Australia, the competition regulator treats a crossed-out price as misleading if the item was not sold at that price “for a reasonable period” right before the sale, or if only a very small proportion of sales happened at it.
The difference is one of method, and it explains why the subject turned technical in Europe. Elsewhere, intent is judged after the fact, with words like reasonable and in good faith. In Europe, a figure is measured. That is more predictable, and it is exactly what makes price history indispensable: a judge can weigh your good faith, but cannot reconstruct a number you never recorded.
Marketplaces, the case people forget
Two points are worth stating, because they cut against widespread assumptions.
First, the rule applies to sellers established outside France as soon as they sell to consumers located in France. Where your company is registered changes nothing. A brand selling from another European country through a French marketplace is bound like everyone else.
Second, price history is per channel. If you sell the same product on your own shop and on two marketplaces, each keeps its own history, and your reference can legitimately differ from one channel to the next. That is one more layer of complexity in a trade that already has plenty, and one more reason to keep control of your prices rather than delegate it, as we set out in our article on opening a marketplace without losing your margin.
The method, to apply before the season starts
- Pull the price history of your twenty best sellers over sixty days. Not thirty: sixty, so you can see what has already locked your current references. If your shop cannot produce that export, you have just found the first workstream.
- Spot the standing discounts in disguise. A product shown as discounted for months no longer has a usable reference price: the promotional price has become the price. It is the most frequent case, and the easiest to fix.
- Lay out your September to December calendar backwards. Start from the discount you want to be able to display in late November, then work back: any operation in the preceding thirty days lowers your reference by that much.
- Check what your tooling remembers. A repricer or an automatic pricing rule must leave a timestamped trace. Without a retained history you can neither defend yourself in an inspection nor even know which crossed-out price is legitimate.
Ten-minute self-check, no tooling required: take five products currently on promotion and ask your team what the lowest price charged was over the preceding thirty days. If nobody can answer without opening the database, your display is probably a declaration rather than a fact.
The options, and what they are worth
| Option | What you get | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|
| Keep the history manually | Works on a small catalogue and costs time on every campaign. Becomes unmanageable as soon as prices move often | Fewer than a hundred references, rare promotions |
| Freeze prices thirty days before an operation | Simple, safe, and often the best call. The trade-off is giving up the small promotions that keep traffic warm | Shops whose revenue concentrates on two or three peak moments |
| Capture the history automatically | The reference price computes itself and displays itself. Requires the shop to record a daily snapshot, not only manual changes | Active catalogue, frequent promotions, dynamic pricing |
| Use the recommended retail price as reference | Not compliant. The reference is your own charged price, not a theoretical one | No case at all |
Tooling
The hard part is not the display, it is the memory. A shop records the current price, rarely its day-by-day history, and it is that history the rule assumes. Reconstructing it afterwards is impossible: the data does not exist.
We deploy the modules published by Datafirefly Limited, our agency’s sister company: Omnibus Compliance for PrestaShop, Lowest price in 30 days for WooCommerce and Lowest price in 30 days for Shopware 6. All three take a daily snapshot and also capture changes as they happen, display the lowest price of the last thirty days on the product page, and export the history. One-off purchase · 12 months of updates.
The WooCommerce and Shopware versions also handle progressive markdowns: within a single operation whose discount increases in uninterrupted steps, they keep the price from before the first step as the reference, in line with the exception in article L. 112-1-1. Outside that case they apply the rolling thirty-day minimum, which remains the rule.
An honest caveat, and it cuts against what you read everywhere: no platform keeps your price history for you. Shopware and Shopify do offer a dedicated field, but their documentation asks you to fill in the value yourself: the field displays, it does not compute. On Shopware, the version mentioned above fills that native field for you: it computes the value and writes it, with no theme override. We set out the platform-by-platform check in our compliance matrix. The principle never changes: you have to decide today to record data you will need in thirty days.
Method beats tooling, and here it is mechanical: no module recovers a history that was never captured. Installing before the season rather than during it is the only thing that counts.
What this says more broadly
This rule has a side effect we see in every client who takes it seriously: it disciplines the promotional calendar.
Many shops discount by reflex, for want of a plan. The reference price constraint forces you to decide in advance which moments deserve a real discount, and to protect the thirty days before them. That is exactly the trade-off we work through in our acquisition engagements: fewer operations, better prepared, beat a standing discount that no longer moves anything.
Sources
The verifiable claims in this article link to their primary source, accessed on 11 August 2026, and on 16 August 2026 for the European and non-European sources added since. We do not cite a source we have not read.
- Directive (EU) 2019/2161, known as Omnibus, Article 2(1), which inserts Article 6a into Directive 98/6/EC on price indication. Open
- European Commission, guidance 2021/C 526/02 on the interpretation and application of Article 6a of Directive 98/6/EC. Open
- French Consumer Code, article L. 112-1-1, created by order no. 2021-1734 of 22 December 2021, in force since 28 May 2022. Open
- French Commercial Code, article L. 310-3, official sale periods and the reserved use of the word soldes. Open
- French law no. 2025-594 of 30 June 2025, article 19, investigative powers of the consumer protection authority. Open
- French Consumer Code, article L. 512-11, authorised agents’ access to software, stored data and algorithms, in force since 2 July 2025. Open
- DGCCRF, practical guide to price reduction announcements, 5 August 2022. Open
- DGCCRF, press release of 3 July 2025, 40 million euro fine based on records taken between 1 October 2022 and 31 August 2023. Open
- Court of Justice of the European Union, judgment of 26 September 2024, case C-330/23 Aldi Süd, ECLI:EU:C:2024:804: the announced percentage must be determined on the basis of the prior price. Open
- Germany, Preisangabenverordnung, paragraph 11, the German transposition of Article 6a. Open
- United States, Federal Trade Commission, 16 CFR part 233, section 233.1, former price comparisons. Open
- California, Business and Professions Code section 17501, prevailing market price within the three months before the advertisement. Open
- Australia, ACCC, Displaying prices, reasonable period and proportion of sales actually made. Open
- United Kingdom, Competition and Markets Authority, Urgency and price reduction claims: compliance advice for online businesses, 29 March 2023, examples 9 and 10. Open
- United Kingdom, Competition and Markets Authority, Unfair commercial practices (CMA207), guidance published on 4 April 2025 under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. Open
FAQ
Does a past promotion lower the reference for the next one?
Yes, as a general rule: the reference is the lowest price of the thirty days preceding each announcement, and that minimum includes your past promotional prices. One exception, strictly interpreted: within a single operation whose discount increases in uninterrupted steps, the reference stays the price from before the first step. Two distinct campaigns fall back under the thirty-day rule.
Can I show the manufacturer’s recommended price as the crossed-out price?
No. The reference is the lowest price you yourself charged in the preceding thirty days. A recommended price, a competitor’s price or a theoretical price will not do.
What if the product has been on sale for less than thirty days?
You take the lowest price charged since it went on sale. France did not use the option the directive opened for new arrivals, so no particular statement is required. The idea is unchanged: the reference must be a price customers could really have paid.
Does the rule apply if I sell from outside France?
Yes. French consumer law applies as soon as you sell to consumers located in France, whatever your country of establishment. It is a point to watch for sellers present on French marketplaces.
Can Dotsland help?
Yes. An audit of your live announcements, building the promotional calendar backwards from your peak moments, and setting up history capture on your shop. It is part of our acquisition work. Let’s talk, or start with the self-check above: five products, ten minutes, and you will know whether your display holds up.